Offices, in particular open plan offices, generally offer limited individualized or personal control of the office environment in terms of e.g. lighting, heating, ventilation, etc., for the respective office workers or users. At the same time, there are studies which have indicated that users wish to feel in control of their environment, which if achieved may possibly result in an increase in their wellbeing and productivity. For example, studies carried out in the past decades in the fields of environmental psychology, energy efficient lighting, and building automation indicate that there is a significant variation in user preferences with respect to lighting, heating, ventilation, etc., within the workplace or office. However, little is in general offered to office workers in terms of individualized or personal control since, particularly in the case of open plan offices, local changes in properties of the environment in the office by one office worker may negatively affect the (perceived) comfort of other office workers in the office, who may possibly have different preferences with respect to lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, etc., within the office. Furthermore, applications such as energy saving automation solutions (e.g. so called building automation systems), which are constructed so as to in principle be able to provide a certain degree or extent of energy saving, have been shown to be possibly less optimal with respect to saving energy in practice. One of the reasons for this is because such applications generally do not take into account personal comfort and satisfaction of occupants at the locations where the applications are installed. For example, people may deliberately try to sabotage or override the default automatic behavior of such applications because they feel that their own comfort is being compromised by the default automatic behavior of the applications.
With the advent of new and improved technologies for varying properties of the environment in a region e.g. in an office or a home, users may wish to have more control of his or her environment e.g. so as to be able to create a variety of different atmospheric scenes. This development may lead to an increased complexity in user interfaces for controlling the environment in the region. For example, an increased complexity in user interfaces for home control systems (e.g. for so called smart homes) has been observed. One approach for mitigating the increased complexity in the user interfaces is to offer the user a relatively large freedom to choose the desired atmospheric scene by permitting the user to control relatively low-level parameters or properties such as light intensity, temperature, speed of fan rotation, etc. Another approach is to pre-program settings for the most common or used atmospheric scenes, such as in SchoolVision and Dynalite systems provided by Philips.
By way of example, WO 2010/143089 A1 discloses systems and apparatus for deriving, modifying and sharing personal preferences applicable to controllable lighting networks.